AdaptiveMobile Blogs

15th June 2008    Current rating: 

Verizon, Time Warner and Sprint are making a strong, bold move in the prevention of illegal online content in the United States:

Online forums where thousands of child-porn images have been posted have been stricken from three Internet providers, including two of the nation's five largest, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday.

Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint agreed with Cuomo to block access to child pornography disseminated through newsgroups and user groups, a hard-to-regulate sector of the Internet designed to bring together users with like interests.

This is a tremendous victory in the ongoing fight to stop easy access to illegal online content- in particular the sexual exploitation of children. But officials involved raised an important issue:

When one point of Web access is closed, the same perpetrators are likely to open another. And his agreements with the online services end at the nation's borders.

"They are very inventive and obviously a lot of this industry moves offshore very quickly," said Professor Christine Corcos of the Louisiana State University Law Center. "As long as the people who produce this material think they have markets, and they think they can reach that market, they are going to continue and the thing is they can just move to other countries."

It is absolutely imperative that other nations join this commitment by enacting similar efforts. Additionally, as the adoption of the mobile Internet continues to grow, mobile carriers need to take these steps as well. Our CEO, Lorcan Burke, weighed in:

"This is a real step in the right direction to combat the growing presence of illegal and exploitative child content online. However, it is crucial that these efforts are extended into the mobile environment, which has seen major growth in illegal content globally over the last year, as the number of mobile subscribers accessing the internet via their phones continues to rise rapidly.

"The US has taken a critical first step to stop child pornography on the Internet, and we call for service providers worldwide to take a similar approach to eliminate this content on mobile devices as well as PCs. There has been an ongoing discussion about responsibilities between governments and ISPs in recent years in many countries, with ISPs resisting the need to 'police' the Internet with the argument of freedom of expression. However, the story with child pornography is black and white: it is immoral, illegal and needs to be stopped.

"Protecting children and stopping the proliferation of this material needs to be a global effort, with service providers at the helm. By not taking mobile into account, however, the industry risks seeing a ‘platform jump:’ in which these sites move onto mobile. We encourage mobile service providers to extend these blocks and to involve groups that have an in-depth knowledge of these threats to children, such as the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). Many adult pornographic sites are already being accessed using mobile technology - I can only hope that this doesn't accelerate the trend to include illegal content by forcing if off of the PC."

We at AdaptiveMobile applaud the US carriers’ efforts in taking a strong first step and look forward to the positive results that these efforts will lead to. And as always, we will continue our support of mobile carriers in these areas. 

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